As the nation debates the merits of Speaker Boehners lawsuit over executive overreach, we have this. One sentence grabbed my attention: He [President Obama} used his first-year political capital to try to pass a cap-and-trade plan, but that legislation failed even in the Democratic Senate. Its interesting that two major lawsuits by mulitple states in recent memory - the enjoined one involving Affordable Care Act and now this - can be traced to the Senate ... one essentially because of the states as states being denied a legislative forum and another over executive branch fiat bypassing the model that replaced the original function of that forum. I have already argued that as the primary authors of the Affordable Care Act - at least, before all the fixes visited upon it - that the flaws contained within the Act must be attributed to poor stewardship by the Senate, which was virtually left unchecked by the House and (at the time) the President. But whichever way this current lawsuit is decided, the very relevancy of the Senate as a popularly elected body will be blemished. Either the states as states successfully asserting injury via another expensive lawsuit begs the question as to why they must take this route as effectively disenfranchised parties, or that the EPA - as an agency of the executive branch - may effectively ignore the Senate. Certainly, walking the EPA back would uphold the Senates original verdict in this instance, but since little seems to have been done as a body to check the executive branch - nothing that could be construed as an attempt to jealously guard itself and its powers - why must the states as states be the agents of that defense, drawing on their own resources, organizing a pooling of those resources, especially since the Senate is not a chamber that functions as their voice? online.wsj/articles/mike-kelly-pushing-back-against-obamas-war-on-coal-1407098882
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 21:44:12 +0000
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